You might not think of nightclub DJs as sources of spiritual wisdom, but you’d be wrong, because one once told me a secret about playing to an empty room that has brought me great solace in life. His point was this: when a DJ is starting out, they mustn’t be afraid to alienate all the people already in that club by playing something strange or new. They mustn’t try to second-guess what the regulars want to hear, or stick to the crowd-pleasers. Instead, they should simply take the radical step of playing the music they love.

Sure, they will clear the dancefloor, most punters will walk out, and management will panic about this bongo business with 18 beats in a bar and a donk on the end of each one.

Eventually, though, the people who connect with this sort of music will find their way to it. In time, word will spread, and 50 people will become 500, then 5,000, and your audience will be real and loyal and will connect with you. Longevity will thus be assured, because you will be putting all of your energy into the music and not into the masquerade.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this is a load of pretentious rubbish, and that any DJ who makes everybody leave the club on their first night will get the sack immediately. But the guy did have a point, which is that there’s no point pretending to find significance in things that you have calculated might be significant to others, when you could play the longer game of being true to yourself.

Now, is it just me or would you, when looking to run the entire country, base your plans around the imaginary desires of entirely fictitious people from Christmas telly adverts and their covetousness towards Le Creuset casseroles? Am I alone in wanting to get a bit more sense from the leadership hopefuls of what they actually believe – in their own hearts and far from the madding focus groups? Of what songs they would play if it was OK to clear the dancefloor, and put a donk on it rather than a wonk.

Because here’s the good news: the Labour party have already cleared it! Most of their dancers are currently at the bar, in the lavatory, or at the bus stop trying to get off with someone else. And yet the crucial thing to remember is that this doesn’t mean the gang have to come back with a crowd-pleaser that appeals to everyone.

The Tories certainly don’t appeal to everyone. Millions of people in this country hate the Tories with a fury that boils the blood faster than any cooking implement found in John Lewis – yet the Tories still won. So perhaps all Labour MPs could ask themselves one simple question, and that is not “How do we win the next election?” but “What do I actually feel passionately about?” Call me naive but it would be a start, wouldn’t it?

We’ve become used to living in a world where BBC broadcasters can’t say what their politics are; where religious leaders get into trouble for having thoughts on how we lead and look after each other (a recent poll found that, actually, 44% of us want our religious leaders to speak out). But it sometimes feels as if even the politicians don’t want to talk about politics either; or about, you know, what they actually think.

Nick Clegg, whose party sat by and watched Cameron do things in his first term that Thatcher could only have dreamed of, insisted just before the election that the coalition had been centrist, not rightwing. And then the Lib Dems lost their voters anyway. I did wonder, as he watched his party crash down all around him, if he wished he’d just said what he really felt out loud.

Because politics isn’t just the art of winning, but the art of losing, too. And if you lose having built your dancefloor, and it having been deserted, because what you truly want to hear is not what anybody else wants to hear, well at least you won’t be kicking yourself that you could have been playing your favourite song all along.